This report is focused around Lost and Found data using the intakes and outcomes data received for 2019-2020. Its goal is to reflect everything we could learn about L&F from the available data, make sure the numbers we see make sense, and highlight things that would be useful to show but some/all data required for them are missing.

Date range: 2019-01-01 to 2020-11-30

Report Structure

  1. KPIs: data points that indicate how good the shelter is doing on on L&F. They have numeric goals associated with them.
  2. Supporting data: data points that aren’t a goal themselves but serve as a proxy for improving a goal. For example, the method of RTH is not a performance indicator, but it helps identifying how RTHs take place. The number of strays found per ZIP code is not a metric to improve, but it shows where most strays are coming from to guide resource allocation.
  3. Data notes: the state of the data received from the shelter.
  4. Extra metrics: some ideas for additional L&F metrics and the data points they require.

Scroll down or use the table of contents on the left to navigate throughout the document. Most sections contain multiple tabs showing different facets of a data type. Most plots are interactive, meaning they include tooltips and allow hiding and showing parts and zooming in and out. If something went wrong, look for the house icon in the top right corner of each figure to reset.

KPIs

Yearly RTH Rates by Species

This section provides an overview of the RTH rate per year divided by species.

Overall RTH Rate

This table covers all strays and RTHs. RTH rates shown below are the number of strays with RTO outcome out of all strays. Importantly, there were about 3000 animals across 2019-2020 that did not have a ‘species’ value, so they were excluded from the entire report.

When we go over this, let’s make sure we calculate the rate the same way you do, so we would want to make sure what we see makes sense. If these numbers are right, they are around the HASS average of 30%, showing a small increase from 2019 into 2020.

Species Year Strays RTH_Count RTH_Rate
Cat 2019 2300 36 0.02
Cat 2020 1440 33 0.02
Dog 2019 3198 883 0.28
Dog 2020 2085 651 0.31

Field RTH Rate

This one only counts animals who came in as strays from the field. Normally, we would then split these by RTH method between RTO in the field and in the shelter, but since there were only 5 animals with the ‘field’ outcome subtype for RTOs, this is left out.

The RTH rate is slightly highere for field intakes than the rate for OTC animals which appear on the next tab.

Species Year Strays RTH_Count RTH_Rate
Cat 2019 748 19 0.03
Cat 2020 621 19 0.03
Dog 2019 2409 711 0.30
Dog 2020 1640 538 0.33
Other 2019 11 1 0.09

Shelter RTH Rate

This shows the numbers only for strays that were public drop offs, which is slightly lower than field intakes for dogs (33% vs. 26% in 2020).

Species Year Strays RTH_Count RTH_Rate
Cat 2019 1505 16 0.01
Cat 2020 750 10 0.01
Dog 2019 755 161 0.21
Dog 2020 422 108 0.26

RTH Over Time

This time series shows the RTH rate per month, to show whether there were times with particularly high or low rates as well as the overall trajectory.

It seems like the return rate for dogs has been pretty consistently increasing since 2019 into 2020, with a noticeable peak in April 2020.

We also looked at these graphs for field or OTC intakes only, but they looked fairly similar to the overall one, so we left them out.

Stray Intakes

This section shows the number of stray intakes over time, as well as the breakdown of strays by field/shelter intake. It mainly helps us get a sense of your intake volumes.

Stray Intakes by Month

Stray Intake Subtypes

Field intakes seem to be the majority (again this is mostly context for us, this is probably no news for you).

Length of Stay Differences - RTH v. Other Outcomes

The average difference in length of stay (in days) between strays with RTH outcomes and all other strays is shown in the table below – roughly 8 days for dogs and 5 for cats when looking at the average.

That means that every successful RTH saves 8 days of care on average at Charlotte-Mecklenburg Animal Services, and field RTH would save an extra day or two on average for RTH from the shelter.

This could translate to pretty significant cost savings at scale – assuming a daily cost of care of 30$, if 500 more dogs were returned home in 2020, it would have saved Charlotte-Mecklenburg Animal Services about $120,000 in costs of care. This is a fairly simple calculation, but it gets at the magnitude of the potential benefits.

Species Outcome Count Average_Length_Of_Stay
Cat Other Outcomes 2198 13.78
Cat RTO 69 8.67
Dog Other Outcomes 2494 9.79
Dog RTO 1534 1.93

Supporting Data

Stray Intake and RTH By Found Location - Dogs

The following maps show stray intake and RTH rate by ZIP code to highlight geographical patterns. The first and second tab are similar to previous metrics; the third tab, RTH Gap, shows the number of strays who were not returned home per ZIP code.

The data used in this section is the ‘found zip’ field in the files sent to HASS. We tried to use the crossing field field which would provide the more accurate location, but it was missing for most animals - about 5300 of the roughly 9000 strays in the data. And when there was a value, it was often a reference to a ‘source address’ in that field, so if there is another location field that would be better to plot here, we can do that! Using a specific address will also help us narrow down the map from a ZIP code level to something more granular like a Census tract.

Found ZIP code was also missing often, especially for cats for 3703 animals, so these maps only represent those with non-null values - 3970 dogs and 972 cats (in the next section).

The ZIP codes mapped below are only those with prefix 27, 28, and 29. These seemed to be accounting for the majority of animals.

Stray Intake

The area around the airport stands out most clearly.

RTH Rate

Note that the areas with the highest stray intake also have among the lowest RTH rate, and vice versa.

RTH Gap

This combines the other two tabs to highlight where most additional RTH potential exists - it shows the number of strays NOT returned to home in each area. As the RTH rate is fairly low in the areas with the highest stray intakes, it looks pretty similar to the first map.

Overall, these maps show data for 3962 stray dogs of which 1214 were RTH.

Stray Intake and RTH By Found Location - Cats

This is similar to the maps above, but for 972 cats. Similar areas stand out to the dogs map.

Stray Intake

RTH Rate

Since RTH rate is pretty low across the city, it is also low throughout in this map.

RTH Gap

This is very similar to the stray map because of the low RTH occurrence for cats.

Showing 936 stray cats of which 34 were RTH.

Finder-Found-Outcome ZIP code

With specific location data, one analysis that many shelters found helpful is finding how far from home do RTO dogs go when they are found by finding the distance between their found and outcome addreess.

Here, we tried to do some proxy of that with the available found and outcome ZIP code data. We also looked at the similarity between found and finder ZIP code to identify how often people find animals when outside their neighborhood (ZIP code). We found that:

  1. 68% of all dogs who were RTO were found in the ZIP code to which they were eventually returned. Working with addresses rather than ZIP codes will help narrow down this finding, as a ZIP code could be quite large.

  2. 46% of all stray animals (dogs and cats) were found and picked up by a person who does not live in that same ZIP code. So fairly often people pick up loose animals even when they are away from their home (whereas the first statistic suggests that it is likely to be around animal’s home).

  3. The map below shows the first statistic per ZIP code – what % of dogs found in that ZIP code were also RTOd into that ZIP code (hence live there). It’s noteworthy that in some high intake areas this is even higher than average, e.g. 81% of dogs found in 28216 also live there, even though in about half the times they were found by someone who is not from the neighborhood.

Data Notes

  1. Found location - as mentioned above, if there is a better field for mapping, we could do that, although it was missing for a majority of animals.

  2. Species were missing for many animals, which had to be excluded.

  3. If in 2021 returns in the field have become more frequent, we can look at the RTH rates separtely with the newer data.

  4. The crossing field sometimes included references to no microchip found - is this how you track this data?

Extra Metrics

Other things we could show if we had the data for it:

  1. Distance traveled by lost dogs - we could add this upon getting both intake and outcome addresses for RTH dogs. We would find the distance traveled for each dog and show the overall distribution and some key stats.
  2. Microchip analysis - getting a field that indicates chip scan results or chip issue date will allow us to identify the RTH rates for animals with/out chips and the areas in which animals come in with/out chips.
  3. Number of public found reports and successful RTH by the public (if you are using the lost and found report module in petpoint).

Thanks for reading through, and we’re looking forward to talking through it and thinking about more ways to make this data useful for you.